The Evolution of the Representation of the Female Champion: Disney Animated Cinema from Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs to Zootopia

Understanding the effects of social and ideological components in animated films, especially on its intended audience, namely children and adolescents, is important. The gender stereotypes that are introduced to us as children are reinforced throughout our lives. Audiences absorb the concepts of these workss and in return relate them to their own individual lives and current values of the society. Walt Disney Company animations have always been one of the most fascinating pastimes for children and teenagers. Among the subjects of these works, the representation of female characters has been one of the main themes of Disney animation productions. The company's first feature-length animated film was Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, released in 1937.  80 years later, Zootopia was released in 2016. The evolution of gender and personality stereotypes in these works over the past years, given the cultural context in which they are produced, is a thought-provoking process. The influence of cultural and social factors on the studio's heroism can clearly be seen, just as the producers of these works follow certain strategies and policies to represent the content of the films. In this article, 13 examples of the most important works of the Disney Company from the period between 1937 to 2016 have been selected as the subjects of this research. Selected animations are chosen from works in which the female protagonist is the main axis of the story. The main issue in this research is how women are represented in the content of Walt Disney Studios animation media and the evolution of this representation in the direction of its productions. The reason for choosing these works was the impact of the studio's intellectual and cultural developments on gender stereotypes in the context of their production. The research question is how the representation and meaning of animation media of the image of the female heroine in these works has been depicted and how this representation is influenced by discourse, ideology and values of the time in which the movie was produced and finally how the female hero evolves from the first to the last Disney animation. This study tries to analyze the desired works based on the theories and approaches of representation, in order to evaluate the representation of the female protagonist and its evolution in Walt Disney animation cinema. In this paper, explicit, implicit and ideological implications are analyzed using Roland Barthes' three-level semiotic model. Findings indicate major changes in the process of representing female characters in these productions; the way female heroes are represented from the beginning to the end of the twentieth century, the changes of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, and the changes of the last decade. These developments can be considered contemporaneous and influenced by the first to third waves of the feminist movement.